Classified as "the most popular Apache module" by
E-Soft, PHP is one of the least
frequently mentioned languages amongst the XML discussion
lists.

Yet PHP was among the first languages to support XML
(since release 3.0.6, December 98 using
James Clark's expat
library).

Although this feature is sufficient to parse a XML
document, the limitations of the object oriented features
of
PHP3 didn't allow for an easy implementation of any DOM
interface, and the function libraries developed for
XML have always been very proprietary and limited.

PHP4 (of which beta4 patch level 1 looks very stable)
brings many enhancements to PHP's object oriented
features and should therefore allow a leap forward in the
XML direction.

Uwe Steinmann is currently developing a new extension
for
PHP4 (domxml). According to the source code
provided with beta4 patch level 1, this extension sounds to
be a simpler version
of the W3C DOM .

Another extension which is eagerly expected for PHP4,
developed by Sam Ruby, is
support for Java objects. This extension implements an
access to Java from
PHP and should allow use of all the Java libraries --
such as the many XML parsers and XSL
translators.

Finally, a debate started by Lukasz Felsztukier on the
php4beta@lists.php.net mailing list has initiated
discussion on the direct support of XSLT within PHP.
Despite the views of PHP users that "doing
XML-XSL processing to serve pages at online
time is a waste of performance", the suggestion to use a
"mature" version of Xalan-C has been welcomed
by PHP4 developer Andi Gutmans.